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What does 1t mean to be a butler?

> ‘The Remains of the Day’ novel review

Ethan Gibson Contributor

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I; it always noble to live one’s life totally in service to something greater than oneself? Or is it more often the case

that such preoccupations—with career, tradition, or propriety—blind individuals to the possibilities of love, happiness, and fulfillment? Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, explores these questions with subtle brilliance

in his 1989 Booker Prize-winning masterpiece The Remains of the Day.

The Remains of the Day is set in July 1956 and told from the point of view of Stevens, an aging English butler. The home he has worked in for decades, Darlington Hall, has recently been sold to an American. At the suggestion of his new employer, Stevens embarks on a journey by car through the English countryside to visit Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall. Ostensibly, his goal is to convince her to return to work at the Hall. His true

How a show about a cycling weed dealer became a master class on character-driven TV

> Allow HBO's ‘High Maintenance’ to light up your world

Jacey Gibb Distribution Manager

Dz make for entertaining television. Way back, in the long-ago time of 2005, Weeds introduced us to the tragically-comedic Nancy Botwin, a suburban widow who—gasp—also deals pot. A few years later, Breaking Bad blew onto the scene and set a new bar for gritty, antihero-driven dramas. More recently, you have Netflix’s Narcos, which has given us the based-on-real- events story of Pablo Escobar—and more importantly, dat moustache. However, most drug-related programming, sooner or later, tends to lean heavily into the dramatic side of things: Drug deals gone horribly wrong, gang violence, guns, betrayals over millions of dollars, more guns, showdowns in the desert, did I mention guns?

feelings for Miss Kenton, suppressed for decades, are at the heart of the novel’s powerful sense of loss.

This is, above all, a novel not just of lost love, but of love unrealized and unexplored. Stevens and Miss Kenton are never able to fully express to one another their true selves. In all the years they worked together, their relationship remained fatally cordial and decorous. To Kenton’s frustration, Stevens’ professionalism and sense of duty— inherited from his father—preclude him from the intimacy he cannot even admit he desires. Stevens’ work-life balance hardly recognizes a personal life at all; his dedication to service is so absolute that it eclipses all other concerns. As Miss Kenton and Stevens reconcile, the latter comes to realize (and admit) what his life has amounted to.

As Stevens faces the evening of his life, he is also disappointed with the product of his professional life. The man to whom he dedicated the majority of his career, Lord Darlington, was ultimately a deeply flawed character with misaligned sympathies. In one of the novel’s most poignant scenes, Stevens finds himself deeply questioning the integrity of his association with Lord

That’s why High Maintenance is such a refreshing piece of drug-based television.

Originally a web series from 2012 to 2015, High Maintenance made the jump to HBO in 2016 and has enjoyed two brief, wonderful seasons since.

The first six-episode season introduces us to “The Guy,” played by series co-creator Ben Sinclair, a bike- pedaling pot peddler who embodies the opposite of most pop culture drug dealers. He’s friendly and personable, but he’s also a background character. Instead, High Maintenance shifts the focus on new, different characters every episode, who then interact with The Guy at some point by buying weed from him.

In an interview with Splitsider, Sinclair mentions how the series started as a way to compare weed smokers from Los Angles to the weed smokers of New York: “We thought we could do it in a way that actually showed adult

Darlington. Not only has Stevens lost his opportunity for love—he has also been stripped of the pride he held in his career, which he had placed above all other concerns, and which cost him his relationship with Miss Kenton.

As with all great novels, The Remains of the Day illustrates serious realities of human nature—in this case, through the self-incriminating and subtly devastating voice of the butler Stevens. It is arguably an indictment of the class system that trapped Stevens, but it also has a certain funereal sense to it: One almost feels as though Stevens is the last of a species soon to be extinct—not a dinosaur, but a living relic of a disappearing era. However, Stevens’ situation is hardly unique to the stifling stratification of British society. As Ishiguro has said, we are all butlers in one way or another. We are—like Stevens—dangerously prone to neglecting what truly matters in life, in order to preserve feelings of dignity, propriety, sophistication, or normality. The genius of Ishiguro’s novel is that it illuminates this truth through the beautifully crafted and profoundly sad story of an English butler whose time has all but run out.

New Yorkers who are dealing with the city. We feel that people in New York smoke for many different reasons, whether it’s a city stress or they just like to smoke because it keeps them alive in different ways.” The emphasis is on telling organic, believable stories about realistic characters who just happen to also occasionally smoke weed. Where the show really succeeds is in the expanded 10-episode second season, where we also delve more into The Guy’s personal life. In the premiere, were introduced to his relationship/ non-relationship with a cute Australian bartender. In another episode, The Guy talks about his current living situation with clients-turned-friends. In the seasons best episode, he winds up confined to a hospital bed with nothing but a vape pen to keep him company— until the hospital calls his most recent emergency contact, his soon-to-be-ex- wife. All of these bits and pieces slowly

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help build together The Guy’s life for the viewers, while still juggling the stories of other single-episode characters.

High Maintenance is a show about smaller moments. The moments shared between a weed dealer and his agoraphobic client, who doesn’t even smoke but has spent years buying pot just to have the brief interactions with The Guy. One episode even centres on a dog whose owners are undergoing a separation and who embarks on his own romance with a high-energy dog walker. There’s no grand story arc, no endgame that High Maintenance is working towards, and it plays out beautifully.

Admittedly, this slice-of-life storytelling can sometimes feel too unambitious when an episode’s moments fall flat or fail to produce any meaningful resolutions for the characters. Yet, more often than not, it’s heartwarming, thoughtful, surreal, and more hilarious than it has any right to be.

‘The Remains of the Day’ book cover